Hello World!

2014-April 16
by Tracy Sawicki, Executive Director

The code required to display those two words on the computer screen is often the first thing beginning programmers write. Displaying words on a screen is among the simplest things one can get a computer to do, and it lets students dip their toes in the water with almost certain success. The first thing folks tend to post when starting a blog is the equivalent of Hello, World!: the "why we're blogging" post.

Foundations, particularly private family foundations, generally operate behind a curtain. Seldom are the goals, motivations, and decision processes laid out for the world to see. Similarly, Foundations have only recently begun sharing their work on the public stage, outside the context of commissioned reports that few ever read.

Our blog, Pile of Papers, is intended to pull back the curtain and help those who are interested understand better what the Tower Foundation is trying to accomplish, how it's trying to accomplish these things, and to tell our grantees' stories. Along the way, we hope that this blog will also help put faces and voices to the people behind the curtain who carry out the Foundation's day-to-day work.

Our plan is to share the way we think about making grants, what we see happening in the fields we work in (i.e., mental health, substance abuse, intellectual disabilities, and learning disabilities), offer some concrete tips for writing grant proposals to us, share what we're learning from our grantees, and to showcase the work that our grantees are doing.

We'll have several people writing content for the blog, and we hope that it does a good job of giving folks a back-stage view of what's going on in the Tower Foundation's world. We're looking forward to sharing with you, and we hope you'll take what we post as starting points for lively conversation.